This invention relates to a method and a system for controlling the operation of a telephone exchange from a subscriber connection.
In the design of digital telephone exchanges, various teleservices and control capabilities required by them are becoming increasingly important. Competing operators offer a wide variety of modern teleservices to tempt customers to their networks. Standardization authorities have also specified a plurality of services that will be standard properties in the telephone exchanges of all manufacturers.
Modern teleservices include various capabilities for manipulating telephone exchange data, which can be performed by a subscriber connected to the telephone exchange as subscribed control operations. In such a case, the subscriber defines the service or changes data associated with the service from his or her own telephone. The operator of the telephone exchange thereby has to guarantee that each subscriber has access only to his or her own data.
Services are also known in which the subscriber of a service consists of a group of subscribers. One example of such services is the Centrex service, in which a group of subscribers forms a private branch exchange (PBX), each of the subscribers being provided with services normally offered to PBX subscribers. There are also other services in which so-called virtual networks, i.e. service groups, are formed within a public exchange. Even in such cases the customer often also wants to manage his or her own virtual network. A problem therewith is how to offer a data management connection which gives access to the subscriber's own virtual network data whereas no other data are available to the subscriber.
Exchange systems normally comprise an operation control interface through which all required changes in data can be made. The operation control interface comprises several hundreds of different commands for managing the data and the operation of the exchange. The command system also comprises verification of access rights, which allows each telephone exchange operator to have individually specified access rights to the different commands. A drawback of the systems presently in use is, however, that the right to use a specific command cannot be confined to certain subscriber connections only. For example, if an operator has been authorized to change the parameters of subscriber services, the same operator has simultaneously been authorized to manipulate the parameters of all the subscribers of the exchange. The present-day systems do not allow distribution of the impact of a command on a virtual network basis, which has prevented extensive offering of control operations that may be performed via subscriber connections. In practice, this type of services is limited to very simple changes made by the subscriber in functions such as speech transfer.
More demanding data manipulation by the subscriber has to be performed by utilizing a front end computer. The subscriber's operator establishes a connection with the front end computer and manipulates data concerning its own virtual network by software designed for the purpose. The front end computer, at simplest a PC or a UNIX-based minicomputer, keeps record of the virtual networks and associated objects. The front end computer then establishes the actual connection with the exchange and executes the required commands to effect changes.